the Spahis to a Bedouin perishing in the desert of shot-wounds.  Of how she had sent every sou of her money to her mother, so long as that mother lived—­a brutal, drunk, vile-tongued old woman, who had beaten her oftentimes, as the sole maternal attention, when she was but an infant.  These things were told of Cigarette, and with a perfect truth.  She was a thorough scamp, but a thorough soldier, as she classified herself.  Her own sex would have seen no good in her; but her comrades-at-arms could and did.  Of a surety, she missed virtues that women prize; but, not less of a surety, had she caught some that they miss.

Singing her refrain, on she dashed now, swift as a greyhound, light as a hare; glancing here and glancing there as she bounded over the picturesque desolation of the Cashbah; it was just noon, and there were few could brave the noon-heat as she did; it was very still; there was only from a little distance the roll of the French kettle-drums where the drummers of the African regiments were practicing.  “Hola!” cried Cigarette to herself, as her falcon-eyes darted right and left, and, like a chamois, she leaped down over the great masses of Turkish ruins, cleared the channel of a dry water-course, and alighted just in front of a Chasseur d’Afrique, who was sitting alone on a broken fragment of white marble, relic of some Moorish mosque, whose delicate columns, crowned with wind-sown grasses, rose behind him, against the deep intense blue of the cloudless sky.

He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing figures in the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scabbard; yet he had all the look about him of a brilliant French soldier, of one who, moreover, had seen hot and stern service.  He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so after the red, brown, and black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for his skin was naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very soft—­for which M. Tata had growled contemptuously, “a woman’s face”—­a long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, as he leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs’ uniform, with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his knee, was, as Cigarette’s critical eye told her, the figure of a superb cavalry rider; light, supple, long of limb, wide of chest, with every sinew and nerve firm-knit as links of steel.  She glanced at his hands, which were very white, despite the sun of Algiers and the labors that fall to a private of Chasseurs.

“Beau lion!” she thought, “and noble, whatever he is.”

But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of the Algerian regiments; she had known so many of them—­those gilded butterflies of the Chaussee d’Antin, those lordly spendthrifts of the vieille roche, who had served in the battalions of the demi-cavalry, or the squadrons of the French Horse, to be thrust, nameless and unhonored, into a sand-hole hastily dug with bayonets in the hot hush of an African night.